Meraki cofounders Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket are at it again with Samsara

from: Forbes.com

In 2006, two MIT grad students decided to turn their networking research into a startup called Meraki. Six years later, they sold it to Cisco for $1.2 billion. But when their time was up integrating Meraki into its new home, Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket decided to do something completely different.

The duo played around with drones and with tiny Raspberry Pi computers and smartphone chips. Eventually they realized the smaller and cheaper hardware going into those phones and wearable devices could be used for another purpose: industrial sensors.

“Whenever something shifts by a factor of ten, things really move around,” says Biswas. “This was already great for the consumer, but what about enterprise and industrial companies? None one had really been taking that approach.”

So Biswas and Bicket brought some of the old Meraki gang back together to work on new cloud-connected sensors for industry. When they formally launched their new startup, Samsara, early this year, they did so with a core team of a dozen technical staff already in place. And now as the company emerges from stealth mode, they have a big-name investor behind them, too: board member Marc Andreessen.

Andreessen Horowitz has invested $25 million into Samsara in a larger-than-usual Series A round. Andreessen, who was not an investor in Meraki, likes that the founders are bringing what worked with their previous company to a new, but not wholly unrelated, field. “The what of what they are doing is different, but the how is almost identical,” Andreessen says. “These guys have a special formula, and the playing field is bigger than it was for Meraki. There is no Cisco of industrial sensors. There is no 800-pound gorilla. So that playing field is wide open.”

Samsara raised so much money right off the bat because the challenge it’s tackling is an expensive one. Large systems like municipalities have assets like water tanks that are already checked by sensors, but they’re not hooked up to the Internet, Biswas says. And at other companies like big grocery store chains, quality control can be transformed if a sensor is tracking each pallet of eggs automatically each step of the way.

The incumbents, Samsara believes, haven’t dramatically improved their offerings in recent decades. Biswas is confident that the approach he and Bicket perfected at Meraki will allow them to move faster than those larger companies like Honeywell,Johnson Controls JCI -4.53% and GE. And at a large scale, Samsara hopes to connect your sensors for about $100,000, one-tenth the typical contract cost.

Andreessen sees Samsara as a company that can create a virtual replica of the industrial world from the data its sensors collect. Insights from that system could then dramatically change how logistics and operations are conducted, a “monster” opportunity for Samsara down the road. “A first time founder would not do this,” Andreessen says, noting that Samsara raised more than the typical Series A because it needs to solve for software, hardware and services for industrial clients all at once. “If you’ve exited a company for more than a billion dollars, you have a different conversation with VCs the next time around,” Andreessen says.

Biswas knows that he and Bicket have cut out a big challenge for themselves in an industry with slow sales cycles. But Samsara believes it has the talent and experience to overcome those pitfalls and recapture the Meraki magic for the sensor space. “You just have to outrun everyone,” Biswas says. “You can’t be just a little bit better. You have to be ten times better in some way, not 20% better than how the customer did business before.”